True Colors

After John Sith McCain's recent endorsement of degeneracy, and accompanying rejection of two evangelical endorsements, I wrote the following:

The "state-of-the-art, $300-million wonder" that was the Bush-Cheney'04 juggarnaut was based upon one core objective: energize the GOP base and ever last Pachyderm to the polls on Election Day.  The unkillable RINO chimera of "reaching out" and "across the aisle" and "to the center" is the diametric opposite of what Team Sith needs to be doing.  John McCain, of all people, can least afford to take for granted the conservative base he has spent the past decade screwing like a three-dollar whore in favor of stroking his "maverickness" in their faces one more time.  He's got to spend every last cent he'll never raise and every last moment of the next five months mending those fences, and gather in those "Independents" by highlighting and attacking Rodbama's hard-left extremism, not flogging the umpteenth version of Donk Lite.

A one-legged horse would have a better chance of winning the Triple Crown than the above seeing the light of day.  Ditto, consequently, the odds of a McCain administration outside of the funny pages.  And the carnage will extend all the way down the ballot in every state in the country.

Sic semper maverickus.

I hate to call myself a prophet again, mainly because (1) this didn't exactly require clairvoyance to forsee and (2) I really don't want to be right about it.  But if anything, I underestimated Darth Queeg's Christophobic impulses:

In another disturbing sign that Senator John McCain has little interest in reaching out to his conservative base, including evangelical Christian voters, his campaign has declined an offer to meet with the Reverend Billy Graham....

In recent weeks [Doug Wead has] been involved with Brian Jacobs, a Fort Worth, Texas, minister and consultant to the Billy Graham Association, to broker a meeting between McCain and Graham. In May, we contacted the McCain campaign with an offer to arrange such a meeting, as we had done between candidate George W. Bush and Graham during the 2000 election.

While meetings with ministers have caused their fair share of controversy in this election cycle, we thought it was worth a try to bring McCain together with America’s most celebrated preacher.

McCain’s campaign responded to Jacobs with the following letter dated June 3, 2008:

Dear Mr. Jacobs,

Thank you for your kind letter offering to set up a personal meeting between Senator McCain and Dr. Billy Graham.

Senator McCain appreciates your invitation and the valuable opportunity it represents. [italics added by McCain campaign]

Unfortunately, I must pass along our regrets and do not foresee an opportunity to add this event to the calendar.

I know you will understand that with the tremendous demands on his time and the large volume of similar requests, events such as this are extremely difficult to schedule even though each one is important. However, we will keep your event in mind should an opportunity present itself in the future.

I know that the Senator would want me to thank you for your interest and to send his very best wishes.

Sincerely,

Amber Johnson
Director of Scheduling
John McCain 2008

The rejection of an offer to meet with Graham is yet another indication that the McCain campaign has made a deliberate, strategic decision to chart a new course for the GOP, a course without the sizeable evangelical Christian voting bloc serving as its base.

Mr. Wead calls this "a stunning turnabout".  For a man who was both paying attention in 2000 and who set up a meeting during the 2000 campaign between then-Governor George W. Bush and Reverend Graham in exactly this same fashion, it really shouldn't be "stunning" at all.  Though Maverick hasn't gone as far out of his way to piss in evangelical faces this cycle as he did eight years ago, the aforequoted preacher endorsement rejections and the guest shot on Ellen Degeneres' program make this "new course for the GOP" rather difficult to miss, even if he hadn't spent the last decade shivving conservatives at every opportunity.

What is surprising, I suppose, is that Sailor would indirectly snub a man of the cloth who has never, to my recollection, been put in the Pat Robertson category.  Billy Graham has met with every president of the United States since Harry S. Truman.  Even Bill Clinton made the pilgrimmage.  Forget party affiliation (as Reverend Graham has always remained scrupulously politically neutral in these things); it's just something you do when you're running for president.  It almost transcends the cultivation of evangelicals as a voting bloc.  As such it makes McCain's snub all the more seismic.

Mr. Wead sets forth the two fault lines it will rupture, with the first being GOTV efforts:

But the risk is not just that the Republican nominee will lose evangelical voters but that he will lose its massive infrastructure: megachurches with their schools, television programs and massive mailing lists which traditionally play a crucial role for Republicans in voter registration and voter turnout. The cost to the party of replicating this role themselves would be incalculable.

Left wing hostility and bigotry toward evangelicals isn't just cultural.  Libs hated us long before the rise of the Moral Majority, which heralded the rise of Christian activism in American politics.  It was that rise that transformed the brethren in the minds of the "post-Christian" Democrat Party from quaint primitives and anachronistic "goodie-goodies" to "rabid, Constitution-threatening theocrats" who had to be mercilessly and savagely stamped out if the Republic were to be saved.

Sans the invective, religious conservatives elevated the GOP to national parity with the formerly unchallenged Donk hegemony that had dominated America since the Great Depression.  And then beyond that to a new governing majority.  We were a political force that they couldn't stop.

But, as they say, no good deed goes unpunished.  While the Republican Party was riding evangelicals to power, the RINO/country-club/bluenoses that had had the run of the place throughout the halycon pre-Goldwater/pre-Reagan/pre-Gingrich rump years resented the intrusion.  It was one thing to even have these Bible-thumping yahoos in the party at all, but to have THEM make the difference between permanent minority status and running the country?  That reflected directly on the Rockefeller crowd, and they've never forgiven us for it.

That dynamic had its ultimate contemporary expression in the 2000 GOP primaries.  When Senator McCain deliberately attacked Reverends Robertson and Jerry Falwell, that stampeded evangelicals into the Bush camp and sealed the Sith Master's fate for good.  Lord Queeg - a notorious grudge-holder - has never forgiven us for that, either.

He's played that grudge closer to the vest this time to fool 'Pubbies into nominating him, but now he evidently feels free to, at best, take evangelicals for granted, and, if his blowing off of a meeting with Billy Graham is any indication, have us forcibly ejected.

Not only would that be to amputate the arms and legs of his own campaign, but that brings us to the second fault line:

McCain’s team is missing the fact that the vacuum created by the GOP’s divorce from them is being filled by the Democrats.

Both Clinton and Obama have been quietly courting evangelicals, the former in private meetings last year and the later with open, religious language.

Aside from Carter’s winning outreach to born-again voters in 1976, this is a new phenomenon among Democrat candidates. New polling shows younger evangelicals have different views about the poor, the environment and societal attitudes toward [homosexual]s. Public relations expert and evangelical leader Mark DeMoss suggests that Obama could win fully 40% of the evangelical vote this November. By my calculations that figure is low.

I frankly find that suggestion impossible to take seriously.  Then again, I would never have believed that so many Christian voters would get suckered away from Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney (mormonism or no mormonism) by Mike F'ing Huckabee, either.

But even if DeMoss is talking out of his hat, there is one other place that religious conservatives could go on Election Day: back to bed.  If we have "no where else to go," we also have no one left to support - so why would we not just not "go" to the polls at all?

Mr. Wead calls Team Sith's blowoff of Reverend Graham (and Dr. James Dobson, BTW) a "gamble" born of "desperation".  But even a gamble has within it the random chance of success.  This looks more like an act of general election suicide designed to purge the GOP of an "element" Darth Queeg detests and will not tolerate in the party he has at long last conquered.

Given that the Republican Party is doomed without us "snake-handlers," it shapes up as an act of political homicide as well.